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Research on human intelligence has postulated that studying the structure and use of stories can provide important insight into the roots of self and the nature of thinking. In that spirit, this volume focuses on narrative as a crossroads where cognitive and social psychology, linguistics, literary theory, and the recent hybrid called "cognitive narratology" intersect, suggesting new directions for the cognitive sciences. The ideas contained here demonstrate the importance of narrative as a cognitive style, a genre of discourse, and a resource for literary writing and other forms of communication.

The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves.

Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought.

Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.

A bold philosophical investigation into technology and the limits of the human

A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds. 

Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication. 

Addressing readers interested in contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy of technology, media and communications, and science and technology studies, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude critically envisions a plausible posthuman future.